The culture or feel of a campus cannot be reduced to a ranking or a linear measure of any kind. Whether a professor will help you learn cannot be revealed by the number and prestige of his or her alma matres.

Donald AsherCool Colleges for the Hyper-Intelligent, Self-Directed, Late Blooming, and Just Plain Different

Let us all—counselors, parents, and students—reclaim the college selection and admission process as a form of education rather than a form of commercialism. Let us turn our young people first to their imaginations, not toward market driven illusion and false precision.

Philip Ballinger
Director of Admission,
University of Washington

What I’d tell teenagers today: pick a good liberal arts school and learn how to think.”

R. Glenn Hubbard
Dean, Graduate School of Business
Columbia University

Don’t be too cautious. It seems to me that we work hard to craft questions that prevent that, but we see students who are too cautious. Be adventurous intellectually – write unconventionally. Applicants have more freedom than they think, and it’s in their interest to use that flexibility.

John Latting
Dean of Undergraduate Admissions,
Emory University

There are all sorts of internal forces on campuses that drive tuition upward, but they are less important in setting the price of an education than is the conviction that college is an unbeatable investment for a better life.

Nicholas Lemann
“The Cost of College”The New Yorker Magazine

For many students, there has been (and frankly speaking there should be) some struggle to define what you want and what you need in a college. Questioning how one learns best, and under what conditions, should be the central issue…

Bruce Poch
Former Dean of Admissions,
Pomona College

College is a vital step toward adulthood for students pursuing admission processes. We owe them the best support we can muster, because guiding students is a trust of great consequence.

William M. Shain
Former Dean of Undergraduate Admissions,
Vanderbilt University

What is college for? You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.

Judith Shapiro
Former President, Barnard College
College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be
by Andrew Delbanco

Your need for learning, your desire to know, your appetite for new activities and new ideas, your willingness to be stretched beyond your comfort zone, your tolerance for ambiguity, your fondness for hard work, your interest in people, places, and things, and your passion for life – these are what you must invest if you want to create (not get) “a good college education.”